Silverknife - Philosophy and Spirituality

I turned part of this article into the short piece "Secular Morality and the Examined Life", which was posted on George James' Secular Thought For the Day website last week.

These thoughts were sparked by a discussion with a (Christian) friend. Now, the issue of ethics and morality is a huge one, it's the topic of whole degree courses. But I think there are interesting ideas to play with on a much simpler level and in our own lives, without it becoming an academic process.

The way I see it, first you can divide people into two groups - those who hold to some form of religious belief system which provides their morals essentially ready-made, and those who consider themselves unattached to those systems and are building their own morality as they go along, based on their observations and thoughts.

I'm not going to get into a religious debate here (I've had some kind of presence on the net since before the WWW came into being, and I did eventually learn that religion isn't an area to make statements on in a public forum!) , so apart from the odd comparison for contrast I'll just look at the second group, in which I include myself. It seems to me that if you are in this group, it's important that you are thoughtful and aware of what you consider right and wrong, and more imporantly why. If you're declaring yourself independent of religious laws, then all right and wrong must be up for grabs - you can't just say "that's wrong" without knowing why, because you're open to the question "who says so?"

Of course in life it's not really two groups but a spectrum - there are plenty of religious people who examine their morality and hold it up for testing. The really interesting thing is that so many people who consider themselves atheists/humanists go through life accepting what they are told and taught about right and wrong, without every questioning it. They accept "it's just wrong" as though it actually was some kind of unbreakable religious law. A while back I had a discussion with a very serious intelligent atheist woman about this very issue, but when the discussion got onto public nudity (don't ask), her response was "Oh, that's just wrong. We just know it is, it's natural". So "nature", whatever that is, substitutes for religion.

Similarly I was talking to my classmates in Art History about cannibalism (as you do), and two of them said they couldn't accept eating human flesh as ever being right. Yet all of them, when asked, claimed to be atheists and felt that accepting anybody else's rules for life was a bad idea, you had to prove things for yourself. The interesting thing about the cannibalism taboo is that there is a biological basis for it - cannibal societies are prone to cumulative poisons like heavy metals, and diseases like Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, which are transferred by prions (protein fragments which accumulate in a circular diet). But neither of the class members who made that statement knew about about any practical reason not to eat human flesh - it was just "icky".

A strong strand of psychological learning theory, mainly based on the work of Piaget, studies children's understanding of games, and through them understanding of social interaction. It's been shown that part of the development of this understanding is a progression from a belief that rules are absolute and can never be changed, to an understanding that rules are agreements between people which are open to debate and mutual modification according to the circumstances. We might learn something from that.

To me, a large part of my morality is about responsibility - taking responsibility for your own actions and their consequences. That doesn't mean you can always predict what will come from your choices, but you should always be prepared for their effects. It's like good camping - you clean up after yourself. It's a philosophy which has come to me from others via reading and discussing, but which I have spent many years thinking about and testing for myself.

It makes sense to me because independently of any absolute ethics of right or wrong, if you act thoughtlessly, or carelessly harm other people, creatures or plants, the results will ultimately come back to you. That doesn't mean not eating other living things, but dealing with them in a thoughtful way - the Native Americans hunted buffalo for years without harming the herds, because they only took what they needed. They maintained the balance. The settlers wiped them out in no time at all, because they destroyed thoughtlessly.

Equally if you hurt other humans, make their lives less happy, the results will come back to you. You've put a bit more ugliness in the world, and the world of humans is a huge mass of interacting dependencies. That cashier you were rude to for being too slow goes away angry and upset, and takes it out on her co-workers. One of them leaves his shift angry, and gets drunk brooding about it that night, then crashes his car into someone's garden wall and drives off. The owners of the wall have their opinion of human nature badly dented, and start dumping their rubbish over your wall because...why bother when people are so unpleasant? And of course, the reverse is also true - put a bit more love and positivity out there, and it'll come washing back to you sooner or later on the tide. Frankly I like this structure because I instinctively feel that we should be nice to people, but I can't argue that in absolute moral terms without using dreaded terms like "just because it's right", which of course would undermine my earlier point.

Ultimately though, my morality is still up for question. I know it's not bulletproof, but like the rest of our worldviews it's a best case with the information we have to hand. It's a network of connected ideas, a loose map, which fits the world as well as possible for the time being. When new information comes along the map must be adjusted. Right now I'm playing with the "living free" maps, to see if they can be incorporated and where they would fit, what it does to the rest of the map.

I've only found three statements so far which seem to have lasting value to me or resemble morality, I don't know if they'll be of any help to you. Like everything else they're still up for question, they've just lasted a long time - as long as I've thought about them. "Never make a choice out of fear", and "never make a choice out of guilt" are the twin bases of my Seeking philosophy. And to those I would add the ancient Native American phrase "for all my relations", which is traditionally said when entering a sweatlodge to purify oneself. It's a big statement, because "relations" means plants and animals too, and even minerals to some. It encompasses the world, and it means simply that in what I'm doing now, I'm aware of the repercussions for the universe. I take responsibility for the ripples of my own life. It's worth thinking about, I think.